


When Rain is Coming

by motorghost



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blow Jobs, Doctors, Dom Gabriel, Dom/sub Undertones, Experimental, First Kiss, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Hospital scare, Jack's POV, M/M, Military, SEP, SEP mysteries, Soldier Enhancement Program, Sub Jack, Touch-Starved, Young Jack, introspective, oh my god they were roommates, sensory deprivation tank, the Iris - Freeform, thigh fucking, young gabe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-19 09:05:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14870831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/motorghost/pseuds/motorghost
Summary: An introspective trip through the mind of Jack Morrison: former football star, SEP wunderkind, and hopeless devotee of one Gabriel Reyes.





	When Rain is Coming

**Author's Note:**

> This is an experimental story I churned out shortly after the Retribution update and just now got around to editing. It takes Jack's POV as he navigates the strange world of SEP, trying to make sense of his senses, introspecting about his new life, his hopes for the future, and his godly superior officer. Hope you guys enjoy!

Jack never took for granted the blessing of his senses. In Indiana, it was often all he had. Simple pleasures. An agrarian religion, the only one that ever came natural. Huge afternoons made smaller, more manageable by focusing on the permeating fumes of cut grass and pollen. Letting the green sink in. His cousin’s babies, their soft hair, how they always smelled like milk. Tender lamb’s wool and then, suddenly, yarn in his mother's basket. The way the wind would break up an overcast day into distinct stages, like the ten levels of heaven, major and minor symphonies conducted by weather patterns he understood only in his blood. There have been Morrisons on this small farm outside Bloomington for farther back than he cares to memorize and he can feel that root, the close-knit stitching across the decades, as one knows how to breathe but never how one breathes. Like seeds sown in the same patch of earth over and over again, blooming in the memories of their fathers.

Except he was never as comfortable as a bulb in soft earth. Maybe it all left such a deep impression because he knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, in the same place that told him when the rain was coming, that he wouldn’t be there for long.

Now his senses are an assault, and the smell is the worst. He can keep from food if he wants (which he can’t, he’s never been so hungry in his life), he can abstain from touch, (a necessity, upon the orders of his CO), he can close his eyes and retreat so far back into his own mind that he manages to construct, in a very short span of days, something resembling an imagination (purely for escape), but it’s hard to shut down his olfactory senses, and so can feel himself forming the worst of memories with every inhale. All of it an amalgamation, smells he doesn’t have the vocabulary to name and thereby rob them of their power: something like the salve they used to spread on the horses’ sores; something like the pesticides they used to spray on the crops; something like rat poison, something like barn rot. Something like the only funeral parlor in town.

The battlefield is different. He can shut down whatever he thinks he used to be, discard the residual imprints that are growing less and less useful with each new injection. No need to retreat from the now. He can devote his body to its recent engineering. He finds himself zoning out during briefings, violent daydreams triggered by words like “eliminate” and “infiltrate.” When his CO says, “decision,” his mind trips into “destroy.”

He jokes around with the others in the mess but keeps glancing at the red bulbs tucked into ceiling corners, eager and violent as spring tulips, caged and waiting; waiting to call him back to his true design, the only one he’s ever known. The sense of purpose alone is like a drug; the lines between “purpose” and “function” are blurred. When has he ever before felt like he knew for certain what direction his life would take? When has he ever before felt such belonging?

But it’s hard in the dark, in-between spaces between the smell of burned metal and the high of overexertion. Dorms are lined with warm LED’s as if to keep them asleep. Hallways are dim as if to keep them from wandering. Even his fellow recruits are prickly, something else discouraged from exploring. When the red lights aren’t on, there are drills; all else is training or scheduled recreation. But Jack still traces the halls, pretends he doesn’t notice the disapproving looks, searches for something he can wrap his mind around. Something like linoleum. Something like plaster. Something like fresh paint.

Even more liminal than that -- the building itself keeps changing. He’ll be in one room for a specific procedure, then pass by a few days later only to find it’s been converted into something else. Once, he swore he’d exited a five-day work-up in a room with a distinct, glowing hardlight sign: P-034. He went by the next day and not only was the sign gone, but the whole door had vanished.

It’s the nature of this program, a doctor tells him one day. Jack wasn’t even sure she’d talk when he asked her -- all of the staffers, medical and military alike, seem to share some unspoken vow of silence when it comes to their work. Maybe it’s her obvious exhaustion, or the way Jack had phrased it. Sometimes, if he just gives people the space to be themselves, they tell him all kinds of things.

“We’re trying everything. I’ve never been involved in an endeavor with less protocol. Forget rooms being repurposed -- I’m not even sure _I’ll_ still be here before the week is out. My specialty is neurology. Tomorrow they might need a biochemist, and not enough in the budget for both.”

These are the thoughts that follow Jack through the dark halls. They leave, occasionally, when he watches the limited selection of TV, or uses the rec room, or works out, or spars, or whatever else he does just to give his muscles something to do when they weren’t bent towards their all-encompassing purpose, but the thoughts always come back. As if everything else only ever lifts the needle on one of those record players his grandfather used to love; eventually, the music has to go on. Warbling through the dark.

He tells Gabe about it first. He thinks Gabe might listen, or at least, won’t make a big deal out of it if he disagrees. Definitely won’t report him to the shrink.

“Of course they’re trying everything. It’s an experimental program. What did you think you were in for, boy scout?”

Jack can only blink. He had no idea what he was getting into, and knew it at the time; he even told himself a little speech that whatever it was, however bad it got, it would be worth it to combat the threat facing the world. He could be called naive, but he wasn’t _that_ naive.

He doesn’t want to look naive in front of Gabe. “Well,” he smiles, scratches his jaw, “Didn’t expect whole doors to disappear. You gotta admit -- that’s a little horror-movie.”

Here Gabe smirks. He looks down, shrugs those thick brows, purses his lips as he often does. There’s always so much going on behind Gabe’s face and so little on the front. Jack senses it like he’d sensed Indiana weather. Something like amusement. Something like... friendliness, maybe? Something like a thing he’s never known and cannot cross-reference. He has about as much conscious understanding of Gabe’s thoughts as he does about thermals. At least incoming rain has a smell to it.

His senior officer looks up with those dark brown eyes. “You like horror movies, Jackie?”

Now that sense grows into a kind of giddy knot, tanks its chance at ever being understood. No one else calls Jack ‘Jackie.’ “Not really. And if you’re gonna make a children of the corn joke, I’ve heard every version.”

“Thought you’d have a little more faith in me by now.” Then Gabe gestures to the foosball table and Jack follows. “Billion-dollar facility, and they give us foosball.”

He’s right. Jack does have faith in him. More faith than he thought he’d ever have in anyone, in anything. Gabe’s been here a long time, and in SEP lingo, that means he’s a walking and talking miracle. The only one of his seniors to still be running ops is quarantined away from the rest of the team. Taken out only in the direst of circumstances; a last resort.

They wind up watching a horror movie anyway. Jack isn’t even sure how it happened. But he has a good time, figures it’s healthy to be afraid of something that isn’t real every once in awhile. And he finds sitting beside Gabe comforting, even four feet apart. It’s like he can feel his temperature through the plasticky couch cushions. He hears his sore joints shift whenever he moves. And his smell -- he smells good in a way that Jack would never dare to clarify, even to himself. Especially to himself.

When he returns to his bunk, still smiling from one of Gabe’s jokes, no horror-related thoughts follow. But the nightmares come all the same.

 

 

 

He learns to use his imagination more and more. Something to distract him from the chemical pain, the rough people, the dark empty spaces between missions. Like a secret room that opens up inside him and grows stronger with every visitation. _Dark holes in the tree line._

Jack rolls his eyes at himself. _What is this, your ‘happy place?’_ Back home, that would’ve meant anywhere but where he was. He never had a strong vision for anything -- he just knew he wanted more. And he wanted to help people, but that’s as vague a request as any. The Crisis was the only thing that ever gave him a real sense of direction; now that direction has guided him to a world where developing a ‘happy place’ is as necessary as drills. The impetus is everywhere, from the blank walls to the early bedtimes. He can even feel it in the subtext of his CO’s can-opened lectures: “do whatever it takes, Morrison. Mind over matter, Morrison. Tear down those walls, Morrison.” As necessary and prosaic as eating an all-American breakfast; four thousand calories a day.

It tends towards the future, he finds. A bad mission has him dreaming of a world where omnics and humans peacefully coexist. A raucous breakfast with his team has him envisioning a place where they all could work and live without fear of one of them ‘falling out’ like a fruit plucked too early. A night with Gabe discussing their impressions of the doctors, their thoughts on exactly where the program is headed, their goals for the future, everything and nothing -- nights like these make him imagine a world full of nights like these. Maybe discussing less worrying material. Maybe burgers are involved.

Then he realizes, with the self-flagellating scorn of the hopelessly ambitious: _I have to focus on the present. Gabe is talking to me right now. He may not be able to tomorrow._

Over time, he tells himself to stop daydreaming, to ruthlessly accept the discomforts of his reality so that he can grow stronger, be of more use. That might have worked if it were his own body he relied upon. But half of it came from a syringe or a capsule, or the surgeries he can’t even remember. He can’t trust it to build ordinary resilience alone; these are not ordinary circumstances.

Besides -- he’s doing really well. He has to attribute part of that to these mental retreats.

“Did they ever give you the light?”

“Light?” Jack looks up from chess board. He’s just about fed up with the entertainment on offer, and so let Gabe talk him into trying something new. Five of his black pieces sit alongside Gabriel’s tapping fingers. “No. What light?”

“It’s like a blue UV, but more greenish. Cold. They gave me five rounds of it after my first sixth months, then again the next year. Also five rounds. Made my nose bleed, too. You never had it?”

“Nope.” Jack rubs a finger under his nostrils, checking to see that they’ve truly stopped bleeding. He keeps his eyes on the board, as if the intensity of his staring will reveal to him the proper move. As if Gabe is trying to distract him with his concern for Jack’s nose.

“Must’ve not been effective.”

“On me, maybe not.”

“ _Mm_.” Gabe leans back, folds his hands behind his head, his hoodie riding up his stomach where his sweatpants are low enough to show the southern hemisphere of dark, curly hair. “You gonna make a move sometime this year?”

Jack keeps his glances short, pushes away the immediate and absurd correlation his mind makes between ‘happy trail’ and ‘happy place.’ “Maybe.”

“You were a real jock’s jock back in the day, weren’t you?”

“Actually, I made all A’s,” Jack moves his knight ahead of his pawns, a little grin teasing one corner of his chapped mouth. “Folks wouldn’t let me play football otherwise.”

Gabe snorts, then goes quiet. He doesn’t talk about his family as freely as Jack does. Jack assumes it’s because something bad happened; it’s a natural enough assumption, given the rest of Gabe’s personality: a dark, sarcastic sense of humor, a tendency to laugh at odd times. A tough SOB without too many compunctions about putting others in their place. But it’s not in Jack’s nature to pry. Whatever happened to Gabe, he handles it better than anyone else Jack’s ever met. Like he was born to handle it. A natural in the most unnatural of circumstances.

Gabe moves his castle into a challenge position: _out of my way, or lose your knight_. “School’s not for everyone.”

“It’s not.”

“The ability to get all A’s is not the same as being intelligent.”

Jack moves, takes Gabe’s bishop. “Sure.”

Gabe moves. “You are pretty smart, though.”

Jack moves, takes Gabe’s other bishop. Feeling proud, he looks up. The skull-like shadow of Gabe’s deep-set eyes is shocking in the bright fluorescents. Jack can barely keep from squinting. Why is it so bright in the rec room and so dark in the halls?

Eerily, his eyes automatically glide from Gabe to the answer: cameras in every ceiling corner, right next to the red bulbs.

“You think so?”

Gabe knocks his queen into one of Jack’s pawns, still staring down with the same intense concentration. “I said so, didn’t I.”

Jack looks down. He smirks, puts two fingers on his bishop, then makes an ascending whistling note between his teeth as he drags it all the way across the board and into Gabe’s queen. Snatches it up like a child with a piece of candy.

At which point Gabe nudges his castle into Jack’s trapped king. “Checkmate.”

Jack’s jaw falls.

Gabe stands, tugs up on his sweatpants and swings his arms. “Let’s head to the ring.”

“Fuck, I really thought I had you.”

“You’re too attached to your pieces.” Gabe gives him a hand, pulls him up. “It’s all about strategic sacrifice.”

“Didn’t even see your queen. Must be the new meds kicking in.”

Gabe pats his shoulder consolingly. “Maybe it was the meth.”

“Oh my God, that was _one_ time. Three years ago. And it was an accident.”

Gabe grips that shoulder, works the muscle. “Maybe that’s why you’re doing so well. Maybe we should tell the docs they should start incorporating meth into all their first rounds.”

“I’m never telling you anything ever again.”

Gabe sways away, as if about to detach, only for Jack to lean closer in to make up for the new space. So Gabe hooks the same arm around Jack’s neck, makes him bow a little, brings him in closer. “Yeah you are.”

 

 

 

It starts without any notice. One night Jack is laying in his bunk, curled up like a shrimp, when Gabe comes down from the top and taps him on the arm. “Move over.”

And he does. And Gabe climbs in and suddenly the whole space is filled with his smell. Jack arches towards him without even thinking about it, pulled by his own deep inhale, like a snake to a flutist. Something like -- no, he can’t even think of an approximation. It’s nothing specific and yet entirely so. Heady, masculine, almost tangy. Rich, complex. Gabriel.

Gabe pulls up the covers, gives Jack his back, and Jack blinks at his dark outline for only a moment before he realizes that he really needs his sleep. They all do.

Neither of them mentions it in the morning. With everything else they have to deal with, it feels good not to have to analyze every little thing. Unspokens vanish at the naming, like the bad smells he can qualify, but Jack wants to leave this one alone. He sits across from Gabe at breakfast and when the red light goes off, they go out to kill like every other time before. When they get back, Gabe climbs into Jack’s bunk even before he does, and Jack slings an arm over his side.

Briefly, he considers their CO’s order of non-fraternization. The only encouraged physical is beating on each other in the sparring ring. But it was Gabe’s idea, and so he trusts it. Gabe would never do anything to compromise their duties. And when Jack sighs, the deepest, most liberating sigh he’s ever experienced, one that opens the bars of his rib cage like a night flower, and feels Gabe echo that sigh, he knows it’d take a court martial to make him give this up anyway.

 

 

 

The injections become more frequent. Eventually they outfit their whole squad with suits that periodically pump intravenous doses through tubes on the arms and legs. It’s cumbersome. Gabe says as much during the brief. If anyone other than Gabe mentioned it, they might’ve gotten shouted down. As it is, their CO simply replies that it cannot be helped, then dismisses them all to simulations.

Jack’s never felt better. Instead of sliding into hazy visions for the future, he is painfully present in each and every moment, even off the field. Every sore and cut and even nauseous wave is just another dose of adrenaline, another shot to push him further. He’s swamped by sensation in Detroit: rust on the wind, atmosphere sizzled by omnic fire, the singed edges of dead trees. Concrete and diesel and the sweat of the soldier next to him. He knows where Gabe is at any given moment, no matter how far away. The man’s example is intoxicating, generates a viscid blend of both jealousy and admiration, a concoction made medicinal by Jack’s good nature and firm belief in the virtue of competition. He sees Gabe look at him and knows he feels the same. They make a circuit loop of perfectly conducting electricity. The omnics never stood a chance.

And always, the nights together. Sleep that comes like a hammer but stays for only a few hours at a time. Darkness made soothing, nightmares obliterated; all threats waiting patiently beyond the door of their small, cool dorm. Waking up feels like coming back to life: surprise, ravenous hunger, immediate restlessness in the legs. Morning wood quickly hidden and secretly dealt with. When Jack closes his eyes in Gabriel’s arms, the sleep stays longer, goes deeper, and he carries that energy out into the field. A dreamless prescription far better than anything the doctors could give.

One night, Jack swears he hears Gabe whisper something to him, but all he can concentrate on are the sensations: the vibration of his throat, the smell of his breath, the texture of his teeth. They’ve been eating the same bland, nutrient-dense food, they’ve been going through the same workouts, but Jack feels like he’ll learn a whole new language if he could just get a taste of Gabe’s saliva. Then, repulsed by the intrusive thought, he turns away. Gabe does not put his arm around him. The humming air conditioning is impossibly loud.

 

 

 

Then Jack gets shot.

He feels it go through his leg and go down. Something like a branding iron. Something like a boiler room.

Then his mind goes into a place he can’t come back from. Everything is unbearably sharp. His eyes crush, his ears ring. A sound escapes his throat and shakes it like an enormous brass bell inside a rickety wooden belfry. He cries out again and Gabe is suddenly ripping the tubes from his arms, carrying him out of the line of fire; it feels like the earth itself is moving to bear him to safety. That smell he refuses to define carries him back into the dark and then vanishes altogether. It sets off another shock that makes the veins in Jack’s arms stand up high. Then, rapid-fire, in his hands, all over his face, in the patch of stomach Gabe ripped open his chest armor to find. 

 

 

 

Nights squeezed on the lower bunk turn into days inside a huge metal safe. Floating in the dark. Water the same temperature as his body, a faint greenish glow. _Coffins in the lake_.

He only looks at the light once before his eyes shut on their own. Maybe that’s the light Gabe was talking about? He hope it works this time. He hates the nosebleeds. Better than the nausea, but no one can see a churning stomach.

But, after awhile, he can’t feel anything. He can’t even feel the water. It’s as if everything has been disconnected, and then that gets discarded as well. He makes no more compulsive relations, no more comforting references. His mind becomes just another room, repurposed for something beyond his capacity to understand. Horizontal and vertical lose all meaning. He goes through memories that have no place in his life anymore until they fractal into vague horrors before vanishing altogether. He lets go of his body, once as palpable to him as a constant burn, and then finds himself letting go again. He surrenders, he surrenders from surrendering, on and on until he learns how to give up entirely. Then he’s gone.

 

 

 

By the time he’s allowed back to his dorm, Jack is numb. He doesn’t know the time nor day. No one bothered to tell him, and he figures, it probably doesn’t matter anyway. He stopped watching the news long ago because nothing on the holivids reflected what he saw from behind the barrel of his rifle, and so he has nothing to catch up on. No matter -- when he returns to the schedule, it will all be the same. The red corner lights are his only timekeepers. The demands of his chemical existence have dominated his desires for so long that now, drained of them, he wants nothing more than not to be.

A dull panic seizes, worse than in the deprivation tank, but no part of him moves. He can’t allow himself to succumb to something like a panic attack here. It’s not safe. He can’t show weakness. He can’t let down his squad. And he doesn’t want to wind up in psych or worse.

So he looks down at his bed and decides, with all the pliancy of a first-gen omnic, to lay down with his hands on his sternum. _Just lay down and shut your eyes,_ his father’s voice mutters from a corner shadow. _You’ll fall asleep eventually._ But it works about as well now as it did then; Jack tosses until the sheets are dark with sweat.

He doesn’t know how long it’s been when Gabe enters. He looks over to see him silhouetted in the door, but only barely -- those halls are still kept dark. Gabe lingers, the outline of his head still, then a hand taps the door controls and he plods his way to Jack’s side. The weight of him practically resounds through the floor. That’s how Jack notices that his senses are starting to return.

“Hey,” Gabe says, cool as the artificial air.

He doesn’t ask how Jack is feeling because no one asks that anymore. The answer is never good, and it never really matters. Jack just looks up at Gabe while the other man crouches down so that their faces are on the same level. He can count Gabe’s eyelashes from here. He can see the microscopic scar over his left eye where they don’t grow anymore.

“Hey,” Jack growls back. His voice is getting lower, more scratched. He wonders how much of that is the drugs and how much is just age or stress.

Then a large, warm hand presses against his jaw. It pushes up to his ear, fingers the lobe, draws back down to pinch his chin up. Jack’s eyes go wide.

“They fix it?”

Jack laughs -- that question is always code for, ‘do I have to anticipate this happening in the field again?’ Even though he expected it, somehow, it makes his stomach feel all the more hollow.

“Don’t know. But it won’t happen again.”

The ‘sir’ at the end of that statement is implied by his tone, by the way he looks at Gabe. Already they understand so much while saying so little. It’s imperative in a world where they are constantly monitored, constantly measured for anomalies and variances. Almost like being back home; the boys who took his eye in high school. Jack’s told Gabe things he’s never told anyone, just to remind himself that he isn’t just a perfect soldier. That he was something meager, once.

“I wasn’t --” Gabe stops, sets his lips straight. “That’s not what I meant.”

That hand is still stroking Jack, now focused more on the fine hairs at the back of his neck. Jack feels a warm, buzzing sensation that creeps all over, settles in his belly and vibrates through his ears. Gabe isn’t just a soldier, and he isn’t just a boy. That realization has been a long time coming, but it’s not heavy or unwanted. It sinks like a pebble in a rushing river. Maybe it’ll come back up again, later. Then he’ll take a closer look.

“Are you okay?”

Jack nods immediately, even though this simple touch feels like it’s going to send him back to the infirmary. “C’mere.”

He reaches out and pulls Gabe into the bed, moves over for him so that his back is to the wall and Gabe’s form blocks out any available light. He moves their legs until he can feel the firm swell of Gabe’s calf against his own. Ducks his head and lets out a stale breath against his best friend’s chin.

“Feel like I died and came back.”

“ _Mhm_.” Gabe is looking at him, still pushing a thumb over his cheek. Still pushing his calloused palm over his head, like a shepherd checking the shear on his sheep.

“All this shit…” Jack feels the anxiety comes back, but he pushes through it, “All this shit I never thought about, or, I did think about but not for long enough... it all came back. Old shit. Things from my childhood. Like that _way_ of life, these patterns, this whole, uh… recipe, I guess? This bad recipe that I kept on using. It was all there.”

Gabe moves his hand to his chest. “It’s over now.”

“No, it’s like,” Jack’s eyes are very wide now. He isn’t sure how he’s coming off, isn’t even thinking about it, he just knows that Gabe needs to know, “I felt all this shit and then looked at myself feeling it. I felt it and it just dissolved. Like I was looking at it all from some place high up. Through this atmosphere, like... Like a lens, or like an iris. Like I was opening this fist I didn’t even know I’d been holding. But I had to be okay with holding it so tight before I could get it open? I can’t… I can’t explain.” Jack’s self-awareness finally catches up, sinks his stomach, and he repeats in a whisper: “I can’t explain...”

“Sleep, Jackie,” Gabe says, with the air of someone who cares too much to tell him how insane he sounds. He presses his hand over Jack’s sternum. “Just sleep.”

And he does. He falls with Gabe’s hand on his jaw and in the short hairs on top of his head, and if he draws closer in his sleep, it’s only to better hear Gabe’s sonorous lullaby and finally get warm.

 

 

 

He smells him coming. Jack opens his eyes before the door snips shut. He feels the cool air on his bare back and then feels Gabe cover it with impossible heat. Jack’s facing the wall now, a pillow clutched in his arms, but Gabe tugs it out so he can put it under his own head. The press of him against Jack’s back is firm, comfortable, yet high-energy. It’s like laying next to a thrumming nuclear generator -- the air around Gabe is vibrational.

He presses to Jack’s back, joins with his air. Jack shifts forward, following a silent cue that Gabe needs more room, but Gabe just pushes against him again. No air between their lower halves. A hunger builds in Jack’s gut. It’s alarming how quickly his body reacts, how hot it gets. The knot returns with about a hundred brothers and sisters. He’d figured the tank would’ve fixed that.

Jack shifts towards the wall again, and this time Gabe pulls him back with a deep, barely-there whisper: “c’mere.”

And that’s really all it takes. Jack’s jaw loses its tension, which ekes down to his shoulders, which ekes down to his hips. He feels his backside dip willingly into the seat of Gabe’s crotch and then Gabe wraps around, pulls him in, traps him, holds him gently by the throat. Jack can feel that distinctive nose brushing the back of his neck, seeking soft hairs, snuffling like an animal. That small space becomes immediately overwhelmed with smell, heat, and texture: the tug of Gabriel’s sweatpants against his own, the calluses of his hand on Jack’s hairy belly, the unbearable softness of his bare chest on Jack’s bare back. His senses ramp up until the dial breaks. Until descriptive words lose all meaning. Until meaning loses all meaning.

Until he feels how hard he is. Jack’s breath, having stopped as soon as Gabe touched him, rushes in like a gale. Gabe presses a hand to his diaphragm with another pillowed order: “I got you.”

And, _God_ — he really, really does.

There’s no call for them to be quiet -- the walls are thick to prevent the night terrors of some from disrupting the sleep of others -- but Jack doesn’t dare make a sound. Every shift of Gabe’s cock sends a tremor. Every stroke of his hand makes him sigh. Gabe’s sonoros grunts, little pockets of air that release every time their bodies undulate together like matching organs, dresses Jack’s new-found clarity in leaden, magmatic colors. Like the churning of very deep, very hot bellows that pump energy at the patient rate of a growing mountain all the way up his very spine. He knows he’ll cry out with something incriminatory if he gives himself the chance.

Gabe pushes his hand over Jack’s heart, squeezes his pec. Pushes his other arm all the way under his pinched waist and wraps around so he can really trap him. Open-mouth kisses his neck. Hums like he tastes good.

Jack’s never been harder in his life. He’s also never been with a man, or even that many girls, and has no idea, as usual, what Gabe’s thinking. He feels the bliss he felt in the tank return, bracketed by the shocking realness of his superior officer’s unbelievably warm body. He couldn’t ever dream of wrapping his mind around Gabe; Gabriel Reyes is wrapped around his mind. In the very back, in that place that tells him about the rain, the place that opened in the tank, he can feel a new place open. Something big is starting. He knows it as certainly as he knows that Gabriel has him.

And then Gabe gets Jack’s slim earlobe in his mouth, licks hot up the shell. Jack moans loud, slaps a hand over his own mouth even as he tilts his head for more.

Gabe pulls it back down. He doesn’t offer praise until he feels Jack stop resisting: “that’s it.”

He says it like they’re back in the sparring ring and Jack is going after some guy, really shooting his punches the way Gabe taught him. That every time Gabe watched him fight, he could’ve been imagining something like this, jumps Jack’s temperature ten more degrees.

“That’s it,” Gabe murmurs, rolls against his ass again, “Just like that.”

Another moan, softer, quieter. Twice as desperate. As diminutive as that private little nickname. He uses a hand to push against the wall, but he doesn’t need to. Gabe has him. He’s Gabe’s. He belongs to him. Not a man, not a name. Not a set of trophies hanging on a mantlepiece. Not a set of swinging metal tags for others’ record-keeping.

Now he’s hooking a thumb into Jack’s waistband. Now he’s licking his neck. Now he’s driving that thumbnail down the canyon of Jack’s hip muscles, stopping when he touches wiry hair. Teasing, scratching. Tracing the shapes of Jack in the dark with that hot, musty breath on his throat. Close to his blood.

Jack squirms, pushes back. He turns his jaw; he wants a kiss. What he finds are Gabe’s eyes and dark want, flashing like distant coals.

But then Gabe reaches with the arm beneath Jack, clasps his jaw and moves his face right back to where it was. Handles him like a disobedient pet. Ignores Jack’s moan of frustration and makes him still, makes the dissolve flow back inside. Pinned between Gabriel Reyes, the wall, and his own obliterated senses, he _whines_.

“That’s it, Jackie,” Gabe growls.

Like he knows exactly what he’s doing. Like it’s as clear as any round of treatment Jack ever took from a doctor in a white coat, only he trusts it more. He trusts it more than the rapid beating of his own heart, which is begging him to stop, begging him to slow down before it bursts altogether.

Gabe can probably feel his pulse through his belly as he pushes in at the same time his groin moves forward. The pooled feeling overflows, travels up and everywhere, pulls on Jack’s optic nerves until his eyeballs roll backwards.

_“Gabe.”_

Then he feels his sweatpants being pulled down. Down, down, past his knees, then tugged off, so quickly that Jack hardly has time to register the lack of Gabe against his back. Then his enclosure returns, while the other hand seizes the thickest part of his ass, squeezes and pulls open. His throat catches on a gasping shudder. He lowers his head, tries to curl in like a shrimp, and then he feels Gabe tug down only the front of his own sweatpants.

“ _Jesus,_ Gabe.”

And Gabe whispers back, “Shh,” as he pulls up on Jack’s leg and nudges his cock between Jack’s cheeks, grinds against him, growls with an open jaw against the top of his spine. Jack shudders, moans, tries to reach back only to be clasped even harder. With one arm Gabe contains him -- with the other he strokes up and down the firm grid of Jack’s torso, both soothing and managing, sometimes only fingertips, sometimes a hard, slow push. The heat of his palm is outdone only by the heat of his cock, thrusting with all the eagerness of youth, makes Jack open in ways he didn’t think he could. Until he feels the slip of Gabe catch against him.

“That’s it, Jackie,” that rolling growl becomes a wellspring for Jack’s arousal, “That’s good, baby. Yeah, just like that. I got you. That’s it.”

Then he slips his cock in between Jack’s thighs and really gives it to him. Jack squeezes around him, pushes his ass back, begs Gabe with noises he’s never made before, noises he can’t believe are coming from him. He can hear Gabe panting, feel the tug on his throat get tighter. He can feel the swell of himself burn against the sheets, leaking, urging.

It feels like a gift when Gabe rasps, “Gimme me your mouth, baby,” and Jack immediately turns, moves to Gabe’s cock, and swallows him just in time for Gabe to shoot down his throat. The smell is what finishes him -- a few jerky tugs on his own cock and Jack is moaning around Gabe’s barely-flagging length, still sucking even when his own waves have past.

“C’mere.”

Then Gabe gathers him up and chases the taste of himself with the best kiss of Jack’s life. The best now, the best always. He’ll die with the memory of the first time Gabe slowly sank his full mouth against his willing bottom lip. The possessiveness. The invading tongue. The warm, loving strokes up and down his back.

 

 

 

Jack has to explain the cum stains to his CO. They weren’t supposed to be masturbating at all, though it was an unspoken rule that you just did it in the shower. Nocturnal emissions aren’t usually this excessive. Jack burns with humiliation, but it barely shows. It’s hard to keep out from the shadow of his glowing pleasure.

And Gabe is outside, waiting for him. He hooks an arm around Jack’s neck, fingers on the back of his neck, nose in his ear, promising to lend him his mouth next time. _If you’re very good for me_ , he whispers. It makes him want to lay down. It makes him want to take up writing poetry again.

It opens up his vision like a spreading sun, encompasses both the now and the will-be, stays with him in a place he keeps for years. Crystallizes into a vision he can touch, and then calcifies, morphs into a petrified forest. Dark spaces in the tree line where Gabriel always waits.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm new to writing R76, so any comments (or just hello's from the ships' group!) would be awesome. :)))


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